(Governor Tom's Note: This is a short story I wrote my first semester in USC's creative writing program. The file says it was last saved on September 18, 1998. The semester had started on September 2, so this must've been one of the first stories I submitted. My professor was Aram Saroyan, son of William Saroyan, one of California's most noted writers. Aram's not doing too badly himself. He's more avant garde than his father, though, which is why he may never replicate the elder Saroyan's critical and commercial success.
Aram didn't like this piece very much, although he did say it improves as it goes along. The assignment was to write about something we love. I love the desert. Indeed, at the time, before I was sure I'd remain in Southern California after finishing the program, I harbored thoughts [fantasies?] of living in southern Arizona. The first novel I ever wrote, when I was in high school, took place in a fictional southern Arizona town. I'd never been to Arizona at that time, so I suppose I sort of mythologized it in my mind. I did finally manage to check it out during my cross-country drive about a month before I wrote this story.
My love for the desert must not have come through because in his comments Aram said he felt like I'd skirted the assignment.)
__________
Damn, Fletcher thought to himself when someone sat next to him on the commuter train after he’d only been on for one stop. He was hoping he’d get to sit alone during the ride into the city. His half-asleep eyes stared out the smeared window at the six-story law firm opposite the station, which stared back at him with mirror windows. As the train started moving again, he saw the little vulnerable-looking police station with only two squad cars in front. Now he was passing buildings and roads at full speed, mostly offices and fast food restaurants boasting of their existence with a shape or a sign, and eventually lifeless buildings, both brick and metallic, which stared mournfully with hollow eyes as the train passed.
Fletcher turned ahead and stared at the back of the blonde woman’s head. It was short, cut off at her neck, where she reached back with her burgundy talons and scratched around a mole. At the corner of his eye was the woman who’d just sat next to him, a young and bone-thin black woman wearing a long pink dress and smelling like the cherry cough syrup Fletcher’s mom spoon-fed him as a child. Behind the grinding noise of the train’s wheels he could just make out the woman muttering as she read something. He made a slight movement with his neck to see what it was and recognized the two columns of tiny print per page. Her right index finger slid deliberately down each column, one after the other, stroking the Biblical phrases as she read them.
Looking back out the window, he saw the land giving up its domain to the coffee-brown waters of the Delaware, twisting and turning the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Ahead he saw the jungle of buildings that awaited him, a collection of tall, glass, needle-point titans that pierced the daylight just as surely as they blocked it from reaching the pawns who walked around at their square feet.
“Eighth and Market,” the operator said, announcing the first stop in the city before they even reached the tunnel at the other side of the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Fletcher got out along with hordes of other passengers. The trek from the train to aboveground meant negotiating corridors that were no less than intestinal. The tiled walls were urine-yellow and the ground was the color of shit, moistened here and there with puddles that never seemed to evaporate. Beneath his buttoned shirt and T-shirt he could feel a thin film of sweat coat his body while he and the other passengers squeezed through the claustrophobic corridors in one constipated motion before finally ejecting themselves into the urban toilet to bathe in the icy polluted air, which their lungs had cried out for, and then cried out again upon receiving it.
At the top of the steps sat a homeless man whose pale, peanut-shaped face was smeared with the residue of long-term urban exposure, and whose white beard was unevenly cut. He was wearing an old Eagles jersey torn on one side of the collar to make room for the plum-sized cyst on his shoulder. One of his eyes was cataracts white. His trembling hand proffered a soiled coffee cup in case anyone had some change from the train they didn’t need.
“Excuse me, ma’am, can you spare any change so I can get some breakfast? God bless you. Excuse me, sir, can you spare any change? Come on, sir, I’m hungry. God bless you. Sir, can you give me some change so I can get a cup of coffee? The Lord loves you, sir.”
Almost no one answered. Fletcher muttered a “No thank you” under his breath. He speed-walked the three blocks to the gift shop at which he worked, cutting through a park and trying not to pay attention to the overweight elderly man doing jumping jacks by the fountain, shouting out an incomprehensible number with each jump.
Fletcher’s supervisor, a late thirties woman named Pam, was stocking one of the shelves with ribbons and gift wrap when he walked in. Her pasty pale cheeks carried a rouge hint, and her bleached blonde hair was tied back in a bun. She was dressed in her usual Friday clothes: Dark blue jeans and gray sweatshirt, a stark contrast to her usual work garb, a long dress, often decorated with a floral motif. A rich cinnamon smell permeated the shop, which could only mean they’d just gotten a new shipment of potpourri. They sold several different scents of potpourri that always seemed to compete with each other to overwhelm you.
“Hiya, Fletcher.”
“Pam.”
“Could you please help that lady? Thanks.”
The woman at the counter was dressed for work, a cream blouse, black slacks and a long trench coat. She stared stoically through her circular sunglasses as he hurried around the counter to take her purchase. “Hi good morning,” he said before zapping the gift wrap and bow. “Two eighty.”
“Pardon?”
“Two eighty, ma’am.”
“The sign said five percent off.”
“That’s for the clearance row, ma’am.”
“The what?”
“The clearance row. That’s where the sign is.” He nodded at the sign behind her. She didn’t bother turning around.
“Never mind,” she said, leaving the items on the counter and walking out.
Pam strolled over, her tongue curling a piece of mint gum over on itself, the smell of which temporarily blocked out the cinnamon. “So how did classes go this week?”
Fletcher shrugged.
She popped a couple bubbles between her teeth. “Andy and I took the kids to the Flyers game last night.” She picked a lash out of her eye with her pinky.
Fletcher peaked down at his watch. “Awesome.”
“Flyers lost. Andy’s like, ‘I’m never coming again. They fucking suck.’ I mean he gets so serious.”
“I have friends like that.”
“Yeeeeah,” she said, curling a strand of hair around her finger. “And so after the game I says to him I says, ‘Ya know this is always your idea. If it makes you so mad, why do you torture yourself?’” She twirled more hair and laughed. One of her black-purple nails tapped the dirty, scratched glass counter top.
Fletcher thought about that woman. Her attire had suggested she made a decent living. Did her shortness at the lack of discount mean she was really that stingy or was it symptomatic of something else in her life, something that had nothing to do with the price of gift wrap?
“Oh let me get back to doin’ this. I’ll tell yas about it later.” Pam walked back to the boxes.
Fletcher waited until she was back into her rhythm of unpacking before letting out a huge breath of air. It was one of the rare moments during the work day when he could breathe. Most of the time he couldn’t, not when the elderly woman came in to return the opened bag of vanilla potpourri because she had decided her dachshund didn’t like the smell. The woman’s orange hair was enveloped in a net, her peach lipstick was pealing, and her body looked so frail that Fletcher dare not breathe for fear of knocking her over. And he wasn’t able to breathe when a balding man whose glasses magnified his eyes by a factor of ten marched in and lambasted Fletcher with his nicotine-shredded voice because, the man said, he’d only been visiting Philadelphia for a day so far and already hated it for the lack of street signs. Nor could Fletcher let out a fraction of a breath when two fortysomething women on their way home from work stopped by to get birthday cards before nearly clawing at Fletcher’s throat after hearing that the cards were thirty-five scents more than if they’d just gotten them at the drug store. And between every barrage of customers Pam’s voice box became his ear’s companion. Her tongue must always be on a high, he thought. Did it ever rest? When she went to sleep, would her tongue still form words, using the darkness as a chat mate?
No, it wasn’t until that night when he got home from work that he could finally start breathing, after he’d wolfed down his dinner at the kitchen island while his father and stepmother ate in front of the television with a World War II documentary blaring, after he darted up into his bedroom and flicked on the halogen lamp that diffused a soft spray of light just enough for him to read by. He turned on Mozart’s Requiem, which he’d borrowed from his father’s collection of over a thousand classical music CDs, and threw himself on the bed. When he leaned back against his two black pillows, he stretched his legs across the comforter, the toes of his sneakers pointing up at the poster of the Dungeons & Dragons skeleton that glared back at him with jade slits. If he could have stretched his legs until his femurs popped out, he would have. He reached down to the floor and scooped up the newest issue of the Arizona highways magazine. Flipping it open to a random page, he was welcomed by a view of black asphalt stretching ahead while being divided by twin amber lines and supported by an article underneath. It wasn’t the road itself he was interested in, but what lay on the other side of it: Absolutely nothing. Fletcher smiled. Just pure, flat, hot, monotonous nothing.
Yes, now he could breathe. Now he could let out–no, expel–the polluted air his lungs had endured all day as he dreamt of taking a whiff of the hot, dry, lifeless air of the desert, the air that allowed nothing to exist except those who were willing not only to live in it, but to bathe in it. The pure desert air didn’t scar the lungs. The desert didn’t have sun-blocking office towers, no trains grinding their way to and from the bowels of the city, and no customers whining because they’d spent a dollar more than they’d budgeted. The desert would forgive none of that.
Fletcher continued turning the pages at a relaxed pace, his grin as lazy as his heavy eyes. The last thing he saw before conking out was a photograph of a desert landscape with a three-limbed cactus dominating the right foreground.
When he awoke, he was inside the photograph, standing at the edge of the road with the cactus on the other side of it. He smiled and shut his eyes, reveling in the heat with which the sun bathed his scalp. The aridness cleansed his lungs. The utter silence massaged his ears. He opened his eyes and began walking across the road, taking his time, at first not noticing the silver snake speeding at him from down the road. He turned just in time to see its rusty tongue shoot out, not with a hiss but with a honk. It brushed a few strands of Fletcher’s hair as he leaped to the other side of the road, the hot gust pushing him as it zipped by. He caught his breath and smiled at the vista. The glowing hot sand stretched unbridled until it collided with the sky halfway to eternity.
“You better watch yourself,” someone said from behind. He spun around. No one was there. Just the cactus, the road, and more sand.
“Hello?”
“I’m the one talking, you idiot.” It sounded like the trench-coated woman who had refused to buy the wrapping paper and bow. The cactus shifted in the sand toward him. At first he thought it was one of those hallucinations the heat inflicted on new arrivals. Had the distance to it just been cut in half? Were its limbs flexing slightly as it spoke? “Just because you came all the way here doesn’t mean I’m not still mad at you about this morning. The wrapping paper and bow should have been in the clearance section.”
“Why are you here?” Fletcher asked.
“You think my complaints will just dry up out here? I want my discount.”
“Hiya, hon,” came Pam’s voice from behind him. He turned to see a giant albino scorpion less then twenty yards away. “How did classes go?” He could hear the smacking of her gum in sync with the opening and closing of her pincers.
“Pam, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh I just love lying out in the sun. I’m so pale. Ya know I said the same thing to Andy the other day and he says to me he says, ‘Just go to the desert and your problem’s solved. That’s why Fletcher wants to go there.’ And I says to him I says, ‘Yeeeeeah. Ya know somethin’ you’re right.’” The pincers opened and closed at an ever increasing pace until the gum smacking became uninterrupted and deafening.
“I want my discount, God damn it!” the cactus shrieked.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “This is my dream.” The cactus stopped talking. The scorpion became a sand sculpture. Fletcher tapped it in its belly with his foot. The sand was firm as stone. He lay on the scorpion’s back. The arched stinger’s shade provided a nice respite from the sun. He put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.
Fletcher breathed deep, deliberate breaths. He was home.
His alarm clock dragged him from the dream with its screeching. He grimaced at the red numbers that told him it was six in the morning. He squinted at it in indignation while the beeps continued their assault. The clock obviously didn’t respond to his grimace, but it did seem to tell him to get used to disappointment.
